I have been teaching in the Religion Department of Amherst College since 1989 where I have the rank of Professor. My primary area of expertise is Sufi thought in Iran, Turkey, Central and South Asia. In recent years, my major research focus has sharpened to issues of art and the phenomenology of perception in Islamic contexts. I'm currently working on a book dealing with this topic, tentatively entitled A'isha's Pillow: The Poetics of Religious Art.

Directly related to this is my work on vehicle decoration and its iconography. I have been working on trucks and buses in Pakistan and have a book in the works and am in the process of writing a book entitled On Wings of Diesel which is forthcoming from Oneworld Publications.

The work on the philosophy and anthropology of art and cognitive theory in general has not completely displaced my interests in Sufi thought and history. I continue to do manuscript research on the Kubrawiyya Sufi order, particularly on Majd al-din Baghdadi (d. 1219), the student of the eponymous founder of the order, and on Sayyid Ali Hamadani (d. 1385), the nephew and disciple of the Sufi Shaikh Ala' al-dawla al-Simnani (d. 1336) about whom I wrote a book entitled The Throne Carrier of God (1995). I am also very active in a reseach group called the Sufis and Society Project. Some of our collaborative work appeared in a special issue of the journal The Muslim World in 2000 for which I served as guest editor; we are currently working on a book about which I can't say much because it's all hush hush for now....

I am also interested in Sufi literature and have done some translation of poetry, most significantly Death Before Dying: The Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu (1998), a translation from Punjabi. More South Asian Sufi poetry translations are on the way.

I have other strong academic and artistic interests which get pursued depending on the seasons. I have been involved for a number of years in a research group called Radical Reassessments of Arabic Arts, Language and Literature (RRAALL). We recently finished a long and important project on pre-modern autobiographical writing in Arabic. We first published a special issue of the journal Edebiyat; recently, we came out with a book entitled Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), edited by Dwight F. Reynolds.

My focus on dead people notwithstanding, I have a keen interest in developmental and human rights issues and in Islam in the modern world. I have been involved over the years with the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies and with the Five College Women's Studies Research Center. I have also written a small book on Islam as a living religion which has been translated into Chinese, German, Portugese and Spanish; it has recently been reissued as The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Islam.

There are other things to say but I don't want to go on. When I get the time, I take pictures and ride a road bike (not at the same time). My curriculum vitae is available as a pdf file by clicking on the link to the right of this page.